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Topic: General gaming chatter (Read 40962 times)

Picked up Yakuza Kiwami last week (the remake of Yakuza 1 from the PS2), figured I'd at least try to catch up a bit in the series now that 6 has come out. The improvements they added from 0 help a lot in keeping it interesting, with all of the fighting styles intact, and some of the better mini-games. The story is much simpler and shorter, but the pricetag was correspondingly lower (base is $30, but it's on sale for $18 on PSN right now).

Speaking of PSN sales, there's some decent stuff on sale this week. Monster Hunter World for $45 and Tales of Berseria for $20 peaked my interest. Nice of them to put a sale on considering this week has been all about God of War, which has never really interested me.

I had a maaaaassive itch for a good JRPG, but since I only own a Switch and no computer at the moment, I downloaded FFIV and FFVII on my phone and gave them a play-through. FFIV sucks, FFVII is still great. /review you can all go home now. Will be buying a PS4 for the remake.

With nothing else to play I decided to finish off Zelda BotW. Got all 120 shrines and did the DLC. Love that game so much, just fun to pick up for an hour and run around doing not much. Graphics are lovely, the controls are great - highly recommend.

After that I needed something else, so I was tossing up between Mario Odyssey and Splatoon 2. Decided to go with Splatoon 2, even though I hate shooters and it looks childish as hell. And it's great. An awesome, light-hearted game with enough complexity to be interesting. The battle modes are pretty varied and there's one "main" mode, plus 4 others which are on a cycle, changing every two hours. This could be annoying but it seems to work, forcing you into trying something different and condensing the player base so you're not waiting 5 minutes to get enough people to play a less popular mode.

I didn't really expect to like this game (why did I buy it? F*cking good question...), but man, it's fun. And I find a lot of the time that I game more out of habit than enjoyment. Normally I go through long periods of frustration followed by some emotional pay-off that gives satisfaction, beating a boss, finding the item you were looking for. But there's not a lot of actual "fun".

But this game has been a much different experience. Even when I lose in Splatoon it doesn't really seem to matter. I still get pissed when my team blows what should have been an easy win, but it passes by the time the next game begins. Or if I am playing like garbage and dying repeatedly, I re-spawn and run off firing ink or turn into a squid and then, the frustration is immediately gone. It's a really hard game to stay mad at because it's just so damn ridiculous.

Nintendo's online systems are absolute shite, but that's another story for another day.

Sadly Nintendo hasn't really done a good job maintaining relationships with the companies that make most of the JRPGs, so it's been slim pickings since the SNES. Project Octopath Traveler will be coming out on the Switch in July though, and that looks really promising if you like 16-bit aesthetics (same director as Bravely Default).

Been playing Monster Hunter World for the last week or so. So far, not very fun. The story is extremely minimal, it's very much a grindy, repetitive loot/combat fest. The movesets of the weapons are interesting, and the world is colorful and dense, but combat in general is really slow, and your animations on being hit are rage-inducing game-killing soliloquies where a big monster's entire frame turns into a hitbox instantaneously as it decides to move somewhere near you and hits you (sometimes the animations between just moving and "charging" you are identical, one will harm you, the other won't), sometimes even if they clearly missed you, and you fly backwards and do about 10 rolls and wake up stunned, meaning you can't play the game for about 20 seconds. And this can happen 10-20 times per fight unless you play perfectly. Hitboxes are a big problem, and while the Souls games had a few enemies with this problem of them deciding to charge and do massive damage with the tip of their toes or wings or whatever, they were the rare exception there, whereas here it's literally every fucking monster. I haven't had many problems actually completing quests (haven't failed any yet out of the 70 I've done), but it feels like they all take 4x as long as they should since every step, every swing, every animation you take is at a snail's pace, no matter what weapon I try. You can't use items or run unless you completely holster your weapon and wait 3-5 seconds. That's fucking ridiculous. The trophy guide says "minimum 300 hours to platinum", which might be on the low side. Everything seems to be designed to be a waste of time. It got massively popular because it's multiplayer focused (and the first Monster Hunter game on a non-portable console in a while), but everything seems more fun in co-op than it actually is.

Sadly Nintendo hasn't really done a good job maintaining relationships with the companies that make most of the JRPGs, so it's been slim pickings since the SNES. Project Octopath Traveler will be coming out on the Switch in July though, and that looks really promising if you like 16-bit aesthetics (same director as Bravely Default).

Absolutely fizzing for this game. Have played the demo and it's just such a nice looking game, can't wait to get it. You're spot on re: the relationship between Nintendo and 3rd-party devs being poor, though thankfully this seems to be changing since the Switch has been so popular. Nearly everything is getting a Switch port and it seems as though devs are looking at it as a legit 4th platform (after Xbox, Playstation and PC), so hopefully it gets included in the big releases in the future.

I've been doing some Rise of the Tomb Raider after 14 months of not playing. I finished the campaign, go to 100% game completion and now i've started on Ultimate Survivor. I think one of the hardest bits is you can only save at a camp fire. I've already fallen into a spike pit on level 1 and had to redo things.

Well, I've been plowing through Monster Hunter despite my problems with it, as I tend to do with most games. Several monsters still have the problem of you never knowing if they are just moving or if they are "charging/making their entire frame a hitbox", but the Elder Dragon fights near the end don't have this problem as much and were quite fun. The game still has zero story, and it's still 100% a grind-fest, with less than 30 monsters, most of which are palette swaps or extremely similar to each other, but at least the weapon movesets are fun, and you start getting a weapon/armor customization later in the game letting you add skill gems for bonus effects. It's doubtful I'll continue all the way to Hunter Rank 100 though since I'm only Rank 50 now (after about 140 hours) and there are NO NEW MONSTERS to face past Rank 15 other than "tempered" varieties which basically just means they have more health/damage.

I couldn't get into it the first time I tried playing. I reinstalled it some time later and for some reason it just clicked, and I played it for well over 100 hours and fell in love. It's my favorite zombie survival game (well, until now).

Not everyone likes it. It's definitely got some rough edges. It is, after all, not a AAA game.

The sequel is exactly what I wanted, though: lots more of the same, but better. They didn't go out and rewrite the formula like so many sequels do. They improved on the best features and fixed other things and added some stuff while keeping it the same basic game.

My expectations aren't high. I played Tales of Xillia 1 and 2 and they had surprisingly strong character development (like, some of the best in any game). If Berseria has the same, it'll at least be a welcome change from MHW that has 0 story or character development.